


Conspiracy

by mrs_d



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bisexual Steve Rogers, Humor, Mentions of PTSD, Multi, Natasha and Tony try to get Steve laid, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Tinder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 11:03:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4703666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrs_d/pseuds/mrs_d
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers finds himself signed up for some kind of creepy first-impressions dating game called Tinder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conspiracy

**Author's Note:**

> For Clementine, my constant source of Captain America inspiration. (Thanks for the quick beta!)

The first time Steve heard of Tinder, the word was buried in an avalanche of technical jargon that was about as comprehensible to him as any of the other technical jargon that spewed from Tony’s lips on a regular basis. Less so, as a matter of fact, since Steve had become familiar enough with Stark’s armor and weapons to follow at least some of the tech talk. But when Tony started on about business decisions, he got so emphatic and spoke so fast that Steve was strongly reminded of that summer day in 1933 when Joe Borowiecki’s grandmother chewed him out in Polish for reasons that Steve was never really clear on.

Tony was a mess, but none of them knew it yet. This wasn’t long after New York, and he’d insisted on flying Steve, Natasha, Clint, and Bruce out to Malibu for a celebration of sorts. He spent the whole night, however, talking on his phone, giving JARVIS orders, running back and forth to his workshop, and trying to get an increasingly flustered Pepper to sign paperwork.

“Be right back, guys,” Tony told them when he jumped up to answer his phone for the third time. “Just hashing out an investment deal. Enjoy yourselves. Drink, be merry, don’t mess with the security system.”

“All right,” Steve said, though he was puzzled by the request.

Tony jerked his head at Pepper. “Conference call with the Tinder guys, let’s go.”

“Right now?”

“Come on, you’re the boss. I can’t live without you, let’s go.”

Pepper sent them an apologetic look and followed Tony down the hall.

Clint set down his beer a few minutes later and sighed. “Some party.”

“You should have been here for his birthday,” Natasha muttered. “Took me forever to get the glass out of my hair.”

“What happened?” asked Bruce, concerned.

“Drinking, dancing, explosions, public urination.” Natasha waved a hand. “Typical Stark.”

“Public urination?” Steve repeated faintly.

“Yes,” came Tony’s voice suddenly, loud enough that Steve was startled. “Yes, yes, and _yes_.” Tony was striding into the room backwards, facing Pepper’s skeptical eyes.

“No, no, and _no_ ,” she replied patiently. “We—”

“Pepper, come on. These guys are smart, tech-savvy, they’re filling a niche, and, best of all, they’re not terrorists. Where is the downside here?”

Pepper clasped Tony’s hands and spoke firmly. “The downside is that it’s frivolous, Tony. There are better projects, and you know it. These apps, there’s a new one every ten minutes. They’re fads. We don’t invest in fads.”

Tony got that look that meant he wasn’t going to run out of gas any time soon — it was a look Steve was starting to get very familiar with. Pepper sat back down on the couch, but Stark remained standing and launched another argument, this one about algorithms and codes and networks. Steve caught roughly one word for every five; it was like having a bad ear again.

Eventually, he gave up and asked Natasha to tell him about the birthday party. The story distracted Tony from his business negotiations and got Bruce and Clint laughing so hard that the night turned out being kind of fun after all.

* * *

The second time Steve heard about Tinder, it was when Clint was helping him figure out Facebook (and, by extension, the Internet) a few months after Tony’s party. Steve had two pages: the official Captain America fan page, which was co-managed by a team of SHIELD PR specialists, and his own private page, where he went by Grant Stevens and had a very blurry profile picture. Natasha had set them up for him ages ago, sending him his password and telling him it was user-friendly.

 _You’re all super_ , she texted. _You’ll figure it out ;)_

He never did, though. Never cared to, that is, until Clint dropped by one afternoon, and, after two drinks, demanded an explanation as to why Steve hadn’t accepted his friend request.

“You know, Captain, I thought we were friends. I mean, I flew a jet and shot aliens for you, remember?” Clint shook his head sadly. “If that’s not a sign of true friendship, I don’t know what is.”

“We _are_ friends,” Steve answered. “Aren’t we?”

Clint pointed at Steve’s somewhat dusty computer. “You never use that thing, do you?”

“I check my email,” Steve protested. Because he did. Every day. Fury insisted.

“Come on, Rogers,” sighed Clint. He pointed to the desk chair. “Fall in.”

Steve sat obediently, and Clint pulled up a second chair. After three very educational hours, Steve was only too glad to accept Clint’s friend request.

“I got to go,” Clint announced at last. “Early mission tomorrow. Play around with that, text me if you get into trouble. But it’s not that hard. Facebook’s easy, lots of apps, games, things to keep you busy. Plus,” he added with a laugh, “now you can get Tinder and meet some chicks, maybe get laid.”

Steve frowned. “Huh?”

Clint laughed again and opened the door. “Google it. Goodnight, Cap.”

Steve got caught up in watching documentaries on YouTube and forgot all about it.

* * *

The third time, Steve didn’t so much hear about Tinder as he learned a valuable lesson about trusting Natasha Romanov. As in, not to.

They were all at Steve’s place in DC one night in early spring. Chilling, as Natasha put it. This meant that he apparently wasn’t supposed to worry about entertaining them, but he couldn’t help flitting around, checking that everyone had fresh drinks and that there were plenty of snacks. Good manners died hard, or perhaps not at all, so he was a little distracted when Natasha asked if she could borrow his phone for a few minutes.

“Uh, sure,” Steve replied, digging it out of his pocket. “To unlock it, you have to—”

Natasha raised her eyebrows slightly. “Seriously, Rogers?”

He handed it over, just as Clint started telling him about a certain show he should check out.

“Come on, Clint,” Bruce interjected, “Steve’s not going to want to watch a bunch of crazy people talk about aliens.”

“Aliens?” Steve repeated. “What kind of aliens?”

“See?” Clint boasted. “He’s interested. Trust me, Cap. I know it sounds silly, but with everything we’ve seen—”

“It’s a crock,” Bruce almost whined.

“Well, if it is, it’s an entertaining crock,” Clint retorted. “Just watch this one episode, you’ll like it. It’s all about Hitler.”

“Clint!” Bruce hissed.

Clint’s mouth snapped shut, and he flushed. The room had gone quiet around them.

“It’s okay,” Steve said a moment later. “What— what about Hitler?”

Slowly at first, and then with more enthusiasm, Clint started talking about the theories that Hitler had alien technology. Apparently, historians believed them enough to argue about them on a television channel that specialized in history.

“Not _real_ history,” muttered Bruce.

“But not entirely off-base,” Steve said reasonably, and the three of them spent the next little while talking about HYDRA and Schmidt’s quest for ancient magical objects. His teammates knew most of the facts already, of course, having dealt with the Tesseract first hand, but Steve found himself filling in details, like Dugan’s ridiculously dangerous experiments with HYDRA grenades that led to him having no eyebrows for months at a time.

Talking took Steve back to the nights he spent with the Commandos around a fire because, for all intents and purposes, he was telling ghost stories. When he realized that, Steve excused himself and stood in front of the bathroom mirror with his eyes closed, just breathing. He was suddenly exhausted, and the worst part was he knew he wouldn’t sleep peacefully that night — he never did when the past reared up like that.

After a moment, he emerged to find Natasha and Tony having an argument while Clint and Bruce looked on with detached interest. Natasha still had Steve’s phone clutched in her hand, but the screen had gone dark.

“What’s wrong with blondes?” Natasha was asking.

“Nothing. I like blondes,” Tony replied. “Preferably strawberry. But _he_ doesn’t. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen pictures of his old flame.”

“Whose old flame?” asked Steve. Everyone froze.

“Uh, mine,” Bruce said.

“Yeah,” added Tony, eyes wide. “His.”

Natasha scoffed. “Stark and I had a bet about whether Banner liked blondes or brunettes.”

“Oh,” Steve said. “And?”

“My ex did have dark hair,” Bruce admitted. “But... lately, I’ve been finding I really like redheads.”

Natasha looked at Bruce curiously. Bruce’s eyes were on the floor, but Steve could see his face turning pink.

“A man after my own heart,” Tony gushed into the suddenly awkward silence.

“Forget it, Stark. Didn’t you hear him? He ain’t into brunettes,” Clint drawled, and everybody laughed.

* * *

Hours later, Steve forced himself out of a dream — sometimes he could do that, sometimes he couldn’t, and there seemed no rhyme or reason to explain it. Tonight he’d seen Bucky, grinning at him across the fire, bruises still on his face from Zola’s experiments, dog tags glinting against his dark sweater. Steve knew how the rest of the dream went, even if he got out of seeing it once in a while: he held Bucky tight and kissed him again, like he should have that last night by the fire, but nothing changed; he still ended up on that train, listening to that scream echo up through the mountains.

To get the dream out of his head, he flicked on the bedside lamp and dug his anthology of mystery stories out of the top drawer of his night stand. He'd read the same paragraph at least three times before he realized it wasn’t helping any and reached for his phone instead, thinking maybe he’d try one of those silly Facebook games to take his mind off darker subjects.

But his screen was covered in notification bars.

“Shit,” he said out loud, sitting bolt upright. He peered at the messages, wondering why nobody used these gadgets to make a goddamn phone call, especially in an emergency, when he realized the messages weren’t in their usual folder. They were in an application that, as it loaded, had an orange flame on a white background.

“What the hell?” he wondered. There had to be two dozen messages there. And they all came from women whose names he didn’t recognize.

Most of them were innocuous variations on _Hello_ but some were more detailed (Ariana Doulani wrote, _hey Grant what u up 2??_ while Saria Brush sent, _Hi. Nice to meet you, Grant. How’s your evening going tonight?_ ). Some were even more... specific. Jessica Renton offered to suck him off ( _bet you're huge huh baby well i can take it all make you feel so good_ ), while Leigh Hammerstein had written a lengthy description of—

“Oh,” he exhaled, suddenly feeling very warm. He shook his head firmly and closed the message.

After a few minutes of fiddling with the application, he got a sense of how it worked — appalling, not to mention dangerous in his line of work, and where had those pictures of him even come from?

 _Nat, what did you do?_ he texted.

Natasha replied right away, even though it was the middle of the night. _Jeez, Rogers, took you long enough._

Steve scowled. _Just tell me._

_I dragged you into the 21 st century. You’re welcome by the way. How do you like it?_

Steve drummed his fingers on his knee, considering. _I hate you_ , he typed finally.

_You love me. Come on, did Stark and I pick right? Any good ones?_

_I don’t even know how to answer that question_ , he wrote. But then he smirked and deleted it. Natasha thought him such a gentleman, and he was, for the most part. But, then again, she’d signed him up for some kind of creepy first-impressions dating game, so he decided to have a little fun.

 _Two_ , he typed. _One offered to suck my huge cock and the other described touching her pussy. Help me out here: which should I choose?_

There was a long pause. He almost gave in, was about to send an explanation, when Natasha's reply popped up on the screen.

_Blonde or brunette?_

Steve laughed out loud. _Hell, maybe I should just take them both._

_That’s the spirit. Now I need my beauty rest, so I’m going back to sleep. Night Steve._

_Night, Tasha._

He set his phone on the night stand, still chuckling. After a brief foray into the kitchen to refill his water glass, he lay back down. He had his hand on the lamp chain and his head on the pillow when he was struck with a sudden thought and sat up again. He picked up his phone and stared at it, hesitating.

Before and during the war, Steve Rogers had had to be so careful. Now, 21st century or not, Captain America had been very careful, too. But he wasn’t Captain America on Tinder. He wasn’t even Steve Rogers. He was Grant Stevens. Grant Stevens didn’t have to be careful; Grant Stevens could even be a little reckless. Grant Stevens could _take them both_ , like Steve Rogers wanted to. He could look, at the very least.

Once he’d made up his mind, it didn’t take him long to figure out how to change the settings on his profile. He swiped through a couple dozen pictures of men before finally feeling tired enough to turn out the light.

* * *

Steve deleted the application the following morning and asked Natasha to run some very thorough checks to make sure none of the images of him had been made public.

“Are you sure you didn’t want to reply to some of those messages?” she teased.

“I’m sure,” he replied firmly.

“Touchy.” Natasha’s fingers slid over the phone, and her eyes darted up to the Facebook profile on his computer in front of her. “Guess you’re just an old-fashioned kind of guy, huh.”

Steve thought about that for a moment before replying. _Old-fashioned_ was certainly a word people liked associating with him, but it was never one he himself liked.

“Maybe,” he said finally. “If old-fashioned means I want to meet people in person or through friends rather than a computer.”

“Fair enough,” Natasha replied. She closed the window on the screen and spun to face him. “I’m your friend. I’ll see what I can do about getting you a date.”

Steve was going to protest, but she looked so earnest. “Fine,” he said with half a smile. “Have fun.”

“Oh, I always do.” She hopped out of the desk chair and headed for the door. “Later, Steve.”

“Bye.”

After she’d left, Steve wondered if he should have given her more specific — more broad? — search parameters, but ultimately, he decided he was right to keep his mouth shut for now. After all, she couldn’t have that many women in mind, could she? And it wasn’t like he was helpless if he wanted to date. He knew how to flirt. Sort of.

He would try it, anyway. In person, not online. Politely with women. Carefully with men.

* * *

A week later, before dawn, Steve was awoken by a nightmare he couldn’t stop, this one of the Red Skull and the burning factory. But Steve's lungs were asthma-choked, and his whole body hurt in ways he’d forgotten were possible, and he knew there was no chance that he and Bucky were getting out alive.

He lay panting at the stucco ceiling, drenched in sweat. Getting back to sleep would be impossible. So he went out early, jogging as the sun rose over the water.

That was the first time Sam Wilson crossed his path, and Steve Rogers decided he didn’t want to be careful anymore.

* * *

The night before he and Sam headed out to chase a ghost, Steve had the Avengers over again to check in after the helicarrier debacle. After he'd introduced Sam and spoken his piece, none of his teammates said anything for a long moment. Clint had a faint smile playing at the corner of his mouth; Bruce looked a little embarrassed; Natasha gave Sam a look Steve had only seen her use in interrogations; and Tony shoved his dark glasses up to meet Steve's eye steadily.

"Pay up, Romanov," he declared suddenly, and the room seemed to come back to life. "I told you he had a thing for cute little brunettes."

"Excuse me?" Sam spluttered from Steve's right.

Natasha ignored him. "You that short of cash, Stark?"

"No. I just need to be right."

"Big surprise," said Clint.

"Can it, Barton," Tony retorted, pointing at Clint without looking at him. "I think your friend here is just a little sore about trying to set our fearless leader up with entirely the wrong gender for weeks."

"Not entirely wrong," Steve interrupted.

"You could have told me, Rogers. Before I made a fool of myself." Natasha slapped a bill into Tony's outstretched palm, evoking a wince.

"You mean before you lost fifty bucks," Clint corrected in an undertone.

"We could have showed you how to change your Tinder settings," added Tony.

"I'm not completely inept," Steve muttered, though no one seemed to hear him except Bruce, whose eyes widened a little.

"All I'm saying," Natasha continued, "is that it's poor leadership to send me on a mission with only half the required intel."

Steve sent her a pointed look, at which she rolled her eyes.

"We're happy for you, Steve," Bruce said earnestly. "Natasha aside."

Steve laughed at Natasha's glare as he slung an arm around Sam's waist. "You just seemed so determined, Nat. It wouldn't have been right to take that away from you."

* * *

Steve apologized later that night, as they were climbing into bed. "Told you they were weird."

"Aw, that's nothing, man," Sam replied easily. "Wait till you meet _my_ family."

Steve settled in on Sam's left. Tomorrow and the coming days would be hard; God only knew what they were going to find when they started pulling on the thread that was HYDRA and Bucky and all the rest. But Steve had his team, and he and Sam had each other. Plus, they had tonight.

"Family," he repeated against Sam's skin. "Now there's an old-fashioned notion."


End file.
